Young children who are regularly engaged in conversation by adults may have stronger connections between two developing brain regions critical for language, according to a study of healthy young children that confirms a hypothesis registered with the Open Science Framework. This finding, published in JNeurosci, was independent of parental income and education, suggesting that talking with children from an early age could promote their language skills regardless of their socioeconomic status.

Although decades of research have established a relationship between socioeconomic status and children’s brain development, the specifics of this connection are not known. The so-called “word gap” — the influential finding from the early 1990s that school-age children who grew up in lower-SES households have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent classmates — and other evidence demonstrating an influence of early language exposure on later language ability suggests a potential influence of language experience on brain structure.

In their neuroimaging study of 40 four- to six-year-old children and their parents of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, Rachel Romeo and colleagues found that greater conversational turn-taking (measured over a weekend with an in-home audio recording device) was related to stronger connections between Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area — brain regions critical for the comprehension and production of speech.

JNeurosci, the Society for Neuroscience’s first journal, was launched in 1981 as a means to communicate the findings of the highest quality neuroscience research to the growing field. Today, the journal remains committed to publishing cutting-edge neuroscience that will have an immediate and lasting scientific impact, while responding to authors’ changing publishing needs, representing breadth of the field and diversity in authorship.

About The Society for Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience is the world’s largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 37,000 members in more than 90 countries and over 130 chapters worldwide.